The Power Of Art

Product Description

* ' Great art has dreadful manners...' Simon Schama observes at the start of his epic exploration of the power, & whole point, of art. ' The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm & beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless & wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure & then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality...'

* With the same disarming force, Power of Art jolts us far from the comfort zone of the hushed art gallery, as Schama closes in on intense make-or-break turning points in the lives of eight great artists who, under extreme stress, created something unprecedented, altering the course of art for ever.

* The embattled heroes
- Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso & Rothko
- faced crisis with steadfast defiance. The masterpieces they created challenged convention, shattered complacency, shifted awareness & changed the way we look at the world. With powerfully vivid story-telling, Schama explores the dynamic personalities of the artists & the spirit of the times they lived through, capturing the flamboyant theatre of bourgeois life in Amsterdam, the passion & paranoia of Revolutionary Paris, & the carnage & pathos of civil-war Spain.

* Most compelling of all, Power of Art traces the extraordinary evolution of eight world-class works of art. Created in a bolt of illumination, such works 'tell us something about how the world is, how it is to be inside our skins, that no more prosaic source of wisdom can deliver. & when they do that they answer, irrefutably & majestically, the nagging question of every reluctant art-conscript... 'OK, OK, but what's art really for?''